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Unanswered: Formatting when Printing vs Preview

Hi all

I'm looking for some tips on how you might handle controlling a report to print differently from how it previews. Ultimately, I want to remove all colour when printing (going greyscale) but the same report needs to show colour when in preview.

My users use a File - Print command when previewing in order to print.

I've found DisplayWhen, but it's going to be a bigger job than I'd like if I have to have duplicated objects, one for each case.

Optimally what I would want to do is make the whole report print in greyscale when the user actually prints the report.

just a hunch nothing professional though...Is printing not dependent on the printer setings! If already the user is choosing File->print... where is the necessity of you handling the same The choice is already passed on to the user as how he desires to print. Or Am I missing something....

Perhaps Access isn't the place to make that option. Using some archaic modules buried in the code bank, you can control the printer settings at the windows level. Set the printer to gray scale, preview the report, print the report, set the printer back to color. User never sees anything (and has the option of over-riding the gray scale option when the Print dialog comes up).

Even with the printer set to print gray scale, the color document still previews in color (at least it does on my machine).

just a hunch nothing professional though...Is printing not dependent on the printer setings! If already the user is choosing File->print... where is the necessity of you handling the same The choice is already passed on to the user as how he desires to print. Or Am I missing something....

Yes, agreed.

However, the problem with that is that the many users of this database are not ... umm.... savvy enough to remember or be responsible for the printer settings every time they print.

Originally Posted by tcace

ok, we won't

Perhaps Access isn't the place to make that option. Using some archaic modules buried in the code bank, you can control the printer settings at the windows level.

That would be fine if I could get the "trigger" for when the report is printed vs when it is previewed. What I mean here is that I would gladly look for such code to switch the printer at the windows level to greyscale when printed and then back again afterwards, but I can't find how to do that. I want to see it in colour in preview mode, so I need some way of triggering such an event when the report is printed vs when it's previewed.

Originally Posted by tcace

Even with the printer set to print gray scale, the color document still previews in color (at least it does on my machine).

Hmm.... now that's interesting. Are you sure that in such a case, when the preview shows colour but the printer is set to greyscale and you print from the preview, does it print in greyscale or colour??

I'm still curious if there is a way to run an event procedure when a report is actually printed instead of just previewed.

And yes HACK, you did say that, but tcace's post was the one that nudged me to go and actually check the truth of what the customer was telling me. I appreciate your feedback as well

As it turned out, setting the printer to greyscale and then printing worked fine for me and every other system I've tried it on, but my customer still reports that even if the printer is set to greyscale, printing still happens in colour. I'm at a loss since I can't reproduce the problem

I'm going to have to dig deeper and find out why his printer config does this and it seems that everyone else's printer doesn't